An Answered Question.

 Annabel asked me, apropos of nothing in particular, why I didn't believe in God. No-one has ever asked me that before. After a few minutes of deep thought (!) I replied that as far as I was concerned, every possible concept of God was a limiting thing. I know that there is a mystery at the heart of existence, but any attempt to discuss that was bound to be wrong or at best misleading. 

Let me try to explain:

                                             

This picture, by the Eighteenth Century English artist William Blake, is the Ancient of Days (one of the Old Testament names for what became described by the one word "God").

This rather bald statement hides a complex web of allusions and, in Blake's inimitable fashion, asks us to listen to and take into account his complex mythology. It isn't really "God" at all, it's a depiction of Urizen, Blake's name for the Archetype of the organiser of the Universe, a sort of architect or site manager of it. Blake thinks of Urizen as very much an underling.

What I think we miss is the polemic behind the image.  We tend to see God, the Ancient of Days designing and building his universe. He's using rationality, mathematics and logic as his tools. This is the way we've been taught to see God, a mixture of the wisdom of age and rational creativity. He's concentrating hard on the task in hand and he's crouched over his dividers with all the confidence of Christopher Wren setting out St Paul's Cathedral more than a century before this was painted. To help us to understand this image, here's another fabulous picture from Blake:

You'd be forgiven if you thought it was a young Urizen doing his homework from the College of Universe Building. There are the dividers, the focussed crouch, the oblivion of his surroundings. This is Newton, the all-English, orchard sitting hero of rational thought and natural theology, the co-creator with Leibniz of the arcane mysteries of calculus, the mathematics of change and time. Except there was no mystery and certainly no arcanum. Calculus was just hard sums and open to everyone prepared to put in a bit of effort.

And here is the crux. Rationality takes away mystery, whether mundane or cosmic, and puts it firmly and irrevocably in the human sphere. This is what William Blake was railing against in his "Ancient of Days". His world was teeming with inequalities, cruelty, and exploitation which suffused his poetry. Don't forget that instruction by God to Adam to dominate and subdue nature.  It became an excuse and rationale for all kinds of imperialism, patriarchy and violence to the world. Rationality, Natural Philosophy (Science) and Mathematics drove Enslavement, Industrialisation, and ultimately Doré's slums. 

For Blake, we could do better. Jerusalem could be built, it was our choice...

This is the God I don't believe in. But I do believe in mystery....

The mystery I acknowledge is simply the unlikeliness of existence, of a universe that is so amazing that even a drop of pond water teems with life, and what is even more astonishing is that there is an organism that is writing this! 

In my teens, thanks to a widely read and musical Mum I became aware of poets who had recognised this joyful wonder and tried to communicate it. Wordsworth, Traherne, Longfellow and Herbert hinted at it in stumbling words. Beethoven, Richard Strauss, Handel explored it musically. Like most children in our small village I went to Sunday School and was well versed in Bible stories, and because it was a Methodist Church in the North, I was encouraged to sing the magnificent Wesleyan hymns with gusto and enthusiasm. As I got older I got involved with Bible classes and began to wonder when it was that someone in the Church would take me aside and talk to me about wonder, mystery and contemplation. No one ever did. What I did hear was the talk of exclusivity of our particular tradition.

Then I came across a book called Mysticism by Fred Happold who wrote about Religious Experience and its similarity in every culture in the world. I was astonished at what I found inside. Julian of Norwich wrote of a nurturing female god holding the world in the palm of her hand wrapping it in love. A medieval anonymous chap wrote about the cloud of unknowing where rationality just doesn't work. Hildegard wrote about being a feather on the breath of God. Theresa of Avila wrote that God was within. Hindu scriptures told about the depth of being human being identical to the power suffusing the Universe. Buddhists wrote about.....well,  nothing and emptiness. The delightful Islamic story of the religious journey in the Conference of the Birds was mentioned. And good old Thomas Traherne was there too writing about the simple joy of being alive in an enchanted world. It blew me away, and continues to, to think that all over the world and throughout history men and women (and that plurality was and still is extremely important to me!) have explored the Universe not with the Enlightenment tools of human logic but with humility, compassion and joy at being alive in this enchanted world. At this time I needed to make some life choices and I liked drawing, I wanted to make people's lives better and I was quite practical. I applied to Aston University Architecture department and got accepted.

I failed as an Architect, but still enjoyed drawing and design so I got a job in the City Architect's Department. In the office where I worked I met Wilf, about twenty years older than me and a wonderful guide and friend who lent me all sorts of newer religious writings, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, Douglas Harding exploring Eastern traditions (this was the early seventies and I definitely had hippie leanings!). We had endless discussions over the drawing boards..... One day I just decided I wanted to return to Uni and study Religions. So I did.

Lancaster in 1973 was THE place and, thanks to an essay on David Hume's demolition job on natural theology's Argument For the Existence of God Based on the Design of the Universe, I got accepted.

In my first year I came across the metaphor of the blind men and the elephant.

A Great Prince (Aren't they all?) was trying to settle an argument between two priests about some doctrinal matter to no avail. So he blindfolded five of his trusted courtiers and brought in an elephant he'd conveniently been given which no-one had seen. He invited the courtiers to come and feel the animal and describe it. 

"It's a bit like a rope with a tassel on the end."

"No, it's stout like a tree trunk and has some smooth bits near the floor."

"You're wrong. It's smooth and hard and shaped like half a crescent moon."

" For goodness sake. It's a huge snake with a funny head."

"Flat , floppy and flappy obviously..."

But my all time favourite metaphor is the mountain with many, many ways to the summit. Some are well trodden paths that are marked. Some routes are difficult and dangerous. Some are a hard slog and some are easy, but the summit is the same for all. And don't let anyone tell you that their way is the only way: it's yet another throwback to religion backing up imperialism.

I still believe that all humanity shares an impulse to explore the mystery of existence and our place in the Universe. Sadly the tribes of argumentative men (mainly) disputing whose god is the true god have given this fundamental side of humanity a bad press.

The Audience for Sir Gawain?

 

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is arguably the most courtly of Middle English poems, especially ones written in the heavily Norse influenced Northern dialect. My thesis here is that there are explicit clues within the poem to link it to Richard II’s wandering Court which travelled around the midlands and the north in 1397 and 98. Also that there are significant geographical features which could link it to the influential Stanley family within that court. Finally that it may be possible to suggest that it was written for performance as a set piece storytelling event at the the Royal Christmas celebrations in Lichfield in 1398.

  

Arthur’s court is described in all its royal splendour and the young King is given a wonderful cameo role as the rather miffed, impetuous, angered leader of a group of knights not rising to a challenge. This court is a mixture of the manly arts of jousting and physical tests and the more feminine pursuits of conversation and carolling.  Camelot is, of course, the Royal court.  The court that Gawain finds after his travails is set in a wilderness, the High Desert, but this too is a shining place built in the latest style. It is the locus for a gathering rivalling Camelot in luxury, style, hospitality and beauty. Both Camelot and Hautdesert are described lovingly and meticulously. If we posit 1398 as the date for a presentation of Sir Gawain, then we have a reason for Hautdesert being described as the height of fashion. The court in London was very disparaging about Richard’s Cheshiremen almost in the same sentiments that the Gawain poet uses of the denizens of the Wirral! Of course, the polish and panache of the poem itself is an answer to the criticism that there is nothing civilised North of Watford. And If Pearl too was presented to the court, that would be the icing on the cake (or perhaps the enamel on the gold?).

Given that the poem can be dated in its composition around the late 1390’s, there are many links between the poem and the King, the area within which it was written and events in Richard’s reign.

• Cheshire was becoming increasingly important to Richard’s security and psychological welfare. His Cheshire Archers were in effect a trusted and efficient bodyguard. They seem to have a special place within Richard’s heart as he was on very familiar terms with them, even allowing them to use the diminutive name “Dyckon” for him. The controller of his household was Sir John Stanley another staunch Cheshire man, younger son of William Stanley of Stanley (5 miles south of Leek).
• One of Richard’s special saints was Saint Winifred and it is recorded that he visited the Holywell shrine in 1398. Besides the beheading, rolling and restoration story echoing the Green Knight’s career at Camelot, Holywell would have been on Gawain’s itinerary to the Green Chapel.
• RVW Elliott has finally secured the landscape of the poem within a small area of moorland about 3 miles north of Leek and the linguistic analysis suggest composition and copying also within a few miles of this area. The heart of the Stanley interests in Cheshire is actually the ancestral home in Stanley itself: right at the heart of the Gawain country.

• Richard had in 1398 seemingly secured his kingship and his “gyration” possibly consolidated his reign in that he was with friends and supporters. A celebratory story featuring lavish courts in a historical setting would be an ideal gift for the king who has everything!
• Richard is famous for his love of jewels and high end craftsmanship. The Wilton Diptych, a sumptuous piece of work detailing Richard’s presentation to the Virgin and Christ is perhaps the epitome of this and dates from about 1396. It touches on themes prevalent in Pearl, the relationship between the earth and Paradise and the barriers and crossings between them. Let’s face it, in literary terms, Pearl is the equivalent of the diptych.

• The hint of homoeroticism or at least the celebration of male beauty and the physicality of male friendship has been detected in Sir Gawain. Richard’s sexuality has been indeterminate for many historians and his close friendship with Robert de Vere caused Thomas Walsingham, an antagonistic chronicler to accuse him retrospectively of homosexuality.

• 
  The most positively Ricardian chronicle of the reign came from Dieulacres Abbey.                                    …let that sink in….  Dieulacres Abbey was the Abbey that moved from the "Godless Wirral" (a phrase in the poem) to the sheep country around Leek!                                                                                                                                    Almost all the other chronicles of his reign, written after the events of 1399 were pro Bolingbroke and saw the downfall of Richard’s career as of his own making. The earliest Dieulacres chronicler (There were two) writing about 1381 to 1400 is almost sycophantically positive and offers a very different view on Richard’s later reign than, say, Walsingham.

• 
  
  Lichfield, not that far from Leek, even in the depths of winter, was the setting of Richard’s last Christmas court in 1398. He’d visited the city four times that year already so it seems he was quite at home there. The Lichfield locus of the court has been described as glittering, and it seems that Richard, aged only 31, was in his pomp and his prime, as were both Arthur and Bertilak in Sir Gawain! 

 

All circumstantial, all surmise, but somehow compelling to link ths poet, in a however tenuous a way, to the King renowned for his love of luxury, of hunting, of jewellery (especially pearls), of the history of his predecessors, of travelling around his kingdom, of his trust in Cheshiremen and his parlous way with promises.